Economics

North Korea

The dearest egg

I MAY have been wrong, this is perhaps the least surprising lede of all time:

North Koreans who recently fled to China say many of their fellow citizens are losing faith in the regime of Kim Jong Il...

But it goes on:

...after a disastrous currency revaluation that wiped out savings and left food scarcer than at any time since the famine of the mid-1990s, when as many as 2 million people died.

This is not a post about China; it's not the revaluation itself that caused the trouble. North Korea's government aimed to tame inflation by introducing a new Won that basically chopped several zeroes off the old one. The problem was this:

It entailed the destruction of what counted in North Korea for private wealth. A 100,000 old-won limit was placed on what households could convert from old to new, equivalent to one or two years' state wages. But households' meagre state incomes were boosted by market activities. At the prevailing black-market rate, the sum represented just $30, barely enough to buy a 50kg sack of rice. It is not just traders, petty or great, who need cash for inventories. Households riding out the vagaries of harvests and the public-distribution system need plenty too. And so a remarkable thing happened in this repressive state. The public angrily protested, putting the state's resolve in doubt. It announced a flurry of revisions to soften the impact. In a new-year fanfare of achievements by the state media, no mention was made of the reform.

North Korea destroyed private savings, aiming to punish those who had accumulated cash hoards through black market activities. The Los Angeles Times reports today on the latest conditions:

Food remains in such short supply that a single egg costs a full week's salary for many. Rice remains largely unavailable at state stores and can be purchased only illegally at about the equivalent of more than two weeks' salary.

One North Korean woman interviewed said common laborers under the new system were making about 2,500 won per month, barely more than $1 at the new exchange rates prevailing on the black market. Cooking oil is a luxury, so unaffordable that people buy only a few grams at a time in small plastic bags.

The direct action taken by the state has prevented North Korean leadership from blaming the disaster on foreign sanctions. The policy moves have been unfortunate for poor North Koreans, but it's also an interesting turn of events given the approaching hand-over of power from Kim Jong Il to his son Kim Jong Un. Of course, even without the pressure of this currency crisis one suspects that increasing wealth in China, North Korea's closest foreign ally, has made rising frustration among North Koreans an inevitability.

Readers' comments

The administration in North Korea is depriving the people of the basic essentials of life. By being an immature and constant pest to the international community, they have been denied much needed assistance from wealthier nations. Ideally, they would develop relations and international trade with other countries in order to help the poor people of North Korea, but, of course, that is a long way from happening.